The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Whitman was a maternal man—a person, that is, who cares for and protects life—and the hospitals afforded him a chance to live out his maternalism, his “manly tenderness.” Most of the soldiers were under twenty-five, and many were only fifteen or sixteen years old, almost literally “offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,” and now wounded or sick, weak and helpless. He mothered them. He entered into a life of active charity. If you look back at that wonderful catalog of the treats he dispensed in the wards you will see that its structure is simply “I give… I give… I give.” His nursing offered him a chance to bestow himself in a concrete way, and he describes it in the language of physical-spiritual emanation with which he had earlier described the bestowing phase of the self: the boys need “personal magnetism,” they hunger for “the sustenance of love,” they “respond … electric and without fail to affections,” and so on. “It has saved more than one life.” It is no secret that people die of loneliness, that those who lose their wives or husbands tend to die sooner than those whose spouses live, or that a wounded soldier far from home may fail to find the will to live. Whitman intends his “presence & magnetism” to supply that subtle medicine which no doctor can prescribe. He enters the work on these terms in the very first encounter, of course—no one is attending the true need of the prostrate boy until Whitman speaks to him, writes his letter for him, and gives him a nickel to buy milk. It’s a vivifying gift, literally.

  Whitman tells his correspondents that he treats the men “as if they were … my own children or younger brothers.” He gives them the kind of care that a parent would give to a sick child, and they respond to his attentions in kind. Several letters of gratitude have been preserved. The soldiers address him as “dear Father.” They name their children after him. When he himself fell ill in the summer of 1864, a soldier from Illinois wrote: “Oh! I should like to have been with you so I could have nursed you back to health & strength … I shall never be able to recompense you for your kind care … while I was sick in the hospital … No Father could have cared for their own child better than you did me.” Whitman himself understood that his contentment and sense of purpose were in good measure a result of being the object of gratitude. As he wrote to a friend in New York, “I need not tell your womanly soul that such work blesses him that works as much as the object of it. I have never been happier than in some of these hospital ministering hours.”

  Whitman’s nursing also gave him a chance to give and to receive physical affection. He complains that the other nurses are too restrained with the men, “so cold & ceremonious, afraid to touch them.” How can the healing be transmitted without the body? Whitman pets the boys, he hugs and caresses them. Over and over in the letters he tells of exchanging kisses with the soldiers: “some so wind themselves around one’s heart, & will be kissed at parting at night just like children—though veterans of two years of battles & camp life.” Sometimes his kiss is not a parent’s kiss but a lover’s. Writing to a mutual friend about a visit with Lewis Brown, Whitman says, “[He] is so good, so affectionate—when I came away, he reached up his face, I put my arm around him, and we gave each other a long kiss, half a minute long.”

  Late in the war, when Whitman was forty-five, he fell ill for the first time in his life, troubled with headaches and fainting spells. It was never clear what ailed him; by his own account, one doctor told him he had been “saturated with the virus of the hospitals,” another that he had “too deeply imbibed poison into [his] system,” and another that he had “been penetrated by the malaria.”* Whitman had been bold and incautious in his nursing, going among smallpox victims and deliberately tending the worst fevers and wounds (“I go—nobody else goes”). When he himself began to weaken, he considered leaving the work, but soon realized that it was too important to him. As he wrote to his mother, “It is now beginning to tell a little upon me, so many bad wounds, many putrified … but as it is I shall certainly remain here… it is impossible for me to abstain from going to see & minister to certain cases, & that draws me into others, & so on …”

  There is no reason to doubt that Whitman was physically sick, but I think we may take his illness as a fact of the psyche as well. It seems clear that the emotional weight of Whitman’s years of nursing lay in the contact with the soldiers. He chanced upon a form for the dedication of his manly tenderness and, having found it, allowed it to absorb him completely, giving himself away and receiving affection in return. But then: sickness. To generalize his dilemma and put it boldly we might say: affection decays identity. The ego-of-one is willingly wounded in love, broken so as to receive the beloved. In the soldier’s wounds, and in their putrefaction, the ego sees itself, and its fear, reflected. Once the self has abandoned its protective armor, will the lover come to fill the empty place, or will the wound just fester? Whitman’s claims to healing the sick with his personal magnetism belong alongside his talismanic sentence “I know my body shall decay”; for, confined inside the knowledge of that decay, the poet of “Song of Myself” had chosen the decay of giving himself away, the Osiris-decay in which with mingled fear and attraction he allowed himself to be drawn into a dismemberment that bears new life as its first fruit.

  A prewar poem, “This Compost” (the poem I earlier associated with the Osiris etching), rehearses the drama of Whitman’s hospital work in every detail except, perhaps, the last. The poem opens with a man who hesitates to give himself to love:

  I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

  I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my

  lover the sea,

  I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh

  to renew me.

  He senses the threat of disease. How, he asks, can he press his flesh to the earth, “Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within [it]? / Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?” Whitman resolves the fear in his usual manner, through an invocation of “the resurrection of the wheat.” Nature transforms the putrid:

  Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs

  bloom in the dooryards,

  The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above

  all those strata of sour dead.

  What chemistry!

  That the winds are really not infectious,

  That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the

  sea which is so amorous after me,

  That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over

  with its tongues,

  That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have

  deposited themselves in it, …

  The list ends with a striking image for the poet of grass:

  What chemistry! …

  That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any

  disease,

  Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what

  was once a catching disease.

  New love is cautious because it is vulnerable. There is a dark side to nature; the green Osiris has a brother, Set, who rules the desert. If we open ourselves to love, will love come in return, or poison? Will new identity appear, or the dead-end death that leaves a restless soul? In the poem, at least, Whitman resolves his hesitancy by fixing his eye on the give-and-take of vegetable life in which the earth “grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.” In apparent decay the man of faith recognizes the compost of new life.

  This, at any rate, is how Whitman resolves the association between love and decay in the poetry. His central metaphor begins with the sympathetic self receiving the outer world (the world of objects or the lover) with both fear and delight, and then suffering a kind of death, the “chemistry of nature” that leads to the spring wheat, the new shoots, the grass over graves. But in life things are a little more complicated. For Whitman “in the game” the sequence begins with a sympathetic man admitting the soldiers to his heart, and feeling again the simultaneous attraction and risk: a “virus”
saturates his system as he kisses them good-night. But here the plot may have to change, for is there a “chemistry of man” like the “chemistry of nature” which will assure the life of a lover who has allowed a foreign thing to penetrate his blood?

  A curious anecdote will answer the question in the terms Whitman himself might have used. Whitman’s comrade after the war, Peter Doyle, suffered at one time from a skin eruption called “barber’s itch.” Whitman took him to a doctor for treatment. Writing soon thereafter, Whitman tells Doyle: “The extreme cases of that malady … are persons that have very deeply diseased blood, probably with syphilis in it, inherited from parentage, & confirmed by themselves—so they have no foundation to build on.” Both Whitman and Doyle had apparently worried that his rash might be a sign of syphilis. (The association between love and disease needed even less imagination in the days before penicillin. Whitman’s brother Jesse had contracted syphilis from a prostitute and was later to die in an asylum.) There was no obvious “diseased blood” in Whitman’s own parentage, but he felt it close by. And as vegetable life has the chemistry of compost, so, for Whitman, we humans may clean our animal blood through the chemistry of love: “My darling,” he wrote to Doyle, “if you are not well when I come back … we will live together, & devote ourselves altogether to the job of curing you …”

  Here, however, as in Calamus, we come to a gap between desire and accomplishment. Whitman was not able to cleanse the blood—either his or Peter’s—in the fullness of a human love. He could not live out his affections in the form his fancy offered, and his illness dragged on—not, perhaps, the actual ailment that first broke his health but the more figurative “virus of the hospitals … which eludes ordinary treatment.” It became Whitman’s habit for the rest of his life to attribute frailty and disease to the “hospital poison absorbed in the system years ago.” His own imagination, that is, sensed he was not cured. During the war he had allowed himself to cease being the “superb calm character” imagined in his journal, “indifferent of whether his love and friendship are returned.” Instead, he took the risk and opened himself up. And the soldiers returned his love, but not on the terms he wanted. He was always “Dear Father” to them, never “My darling.” His illness, “tenacious, peculiar and somewhat baffling,” lingered on. Had he been born in a different land or a different era he might have found the way. But in the capital of the New World in the middle of the nineteenth century,

  When I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was

  with them,

  How together through life, through dangers, odium,

  unchanging, long and long,

  Through youth and through middle and old age, how

  unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,

  Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with the

  bitterest envy.

  In January of 1873 Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke on the left side of his body which left him bedridden for months. As was by then his custom, he associated his failing strength with his wartime illness. “Had been simmering inside for six or seven years … Now a serious attack beyond all cure.” Four months later, just as he was beginning to be able to walk again, Whitman’s mother died, “the only staggering, staying blow & trouble I have had,” he wrote to a friend. “Unspeakable—my physical sickness, bad as it is, is nothing to it.” In February of 1875 he had another paralytic stroke, this one on his right side. After his mother’s death Whitman had moved from Washington, D.C., to Camden, New Jersey, at first living with his brother George and then by himself in a house on Mickel Street. It was the first home he had ever owned, but these were bad years, with Whitman isolated, debilitated, and depressed.

  Early in 1876 Whitman met Harry Stafford, an eighteen-year-old boy working in the Camden printing office where Whitman’s book Two Rivulets was being set in type. Stafford’s parents owned a farm not far away in the New Jersey countryside, and Whitman soon became their constant visitor. George and Susan Stafford had seven children, and before long Whitman took his place by the fire as grandfather to the whole brood. He took young Harry under his wing. They wrestled and roughhoused together. “Walt, the semi-invalid, drew enough strength from the younger man to pin him to the floor …,” says Justin Kaplan. “They cut up like two boys and annoy me sometimes,” a friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, wrote in his diary after a visit. Whitman was both father and mother to the boy, teaching him to read, offering advice on employment and education, buying him clothes and (for Christmas) a gold watch, asking the print shop to be sure that he learned how to set type, and so forth.

  Whitman would have liked to be something more than a parent. “My nephew & I when traveling always share the same room together & the same bed …,” he tells a prospective host. In September of 1876 he gave Harry what was ostensibly a “friendship ring,” but as the difficulties it stirred up make clear, it was something more besides. Whitman’s rather spare journal entries are all we have to tell the story. Interlined among street addresses and records of petty cash we find:

  talk with H S & gave him r[ing] Sept 26 ′76—(took r back)

  Nov. 1—Talk with H S in front room S street—gave him r again

  Nov 25, 26, 27, 28—Down at White Horse [i.e., the Staffords’ farm]—Memorable talk with H S—settles the matter.

  Dec 19— …

  evening, sitting in room, had serious inward rev’n & conv’n

  —saw clearly …

  what is really meant—

  —very profound meditation on all—happy & satisfied at last …

  (that this may last now

  without any more perturbation)

  scene in the front room Ap. 29 with H

  July 20th ′77, in the room at White Horse “good bye”

  And so forth. The relationship did not break off, the two men continued to see each other regularly that year, but Stafford was moody and quick-tempered while Whitman, we may infer, was perturbed. The ring seems to have remained with the poet. Early that winter, after a visit from Whitman, Harry wrote him an erratically spelled letter: “I wish you would put the ring on my finger again, it seems to me ther is something that is wanting to complete our friendship when I am with you. I have tride to studdy it out but cannot find out what it is. You know when you put it on there was but one thing to part it from me and that was death.” And next we read in Whitman’s journal: “Feb 11 [1878]—Monday—Harry here— put r on his hand again.”

  Whitman wanted to marry before he died. His mother’s death seems to have freed him, or spurred him on. Four months after her funeral Whitman sent a friendship ring to Anne Gilchrest, an ardent English admirer who had been pursuing him for years in letters. Three years later, despite Whitman’s cautions, she arrived at the dock in Philadelphia. Whitman could have made a marriage of convenience. The woman was more than devoted to him—she set up housekeeping in Philadelphia, kept a special room for him to stay in, fed him Christmas dinner … But she had completely misread the erotic poems. It was, as it had always been, the unlettered boy whom Whitman sought to marry to his soul, “some low person …, lawless, rude, illiterate …”

  One has to admire his unflagging desire. It was an old, lonely, crippled man who got Harry Stafford to wrestle on the floor with him, sleep in the same bed, and accept his ring. And he got some of what he wanted. In later years he wrote to Harry, “I realize plainly that if I had not known you …, I should not be a living man today.” By that time their relationship had cooled. Harry had grown up. A journal entry of June 1884 reads:

  H S and Eva Westcott married.

  Whitman accompanied Harry and his bride to the civil ceremony, consenting in the end to be the father again, the father who gives the boy away, not the lover who may keep him.

  The Stafford farm offered Whitman something besides Harry and the opportunity to play grandfather to a family. Not far from the house there was a woods, a pond, and a stream called Timber Creek. Spring, summer, and fall, sometimes w
ith the local farm boys but often alone, Whitman would go down to the water. He would drag along a portable chair and sit beneath a large black oak (“exhaling aroma”), or sunbathe naked (except for his hat—he kept his hat on). He carried pencil and paper and took notes on the trees, the swarms of bumblebees, the song of the locust (“like a brass disk whirling”), the hermit thrush, the quail, cedar apples, a spring that rose from beneath a willow—“gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly … (if one could only translate it)”—and the pond itself with its calamus leaves, water snakes, and birds (“the circle—gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel”).

  Whitman returned to the self of his first song at Timber Creek. Hobbling down the farm lane early in the morning, he would pause by the tall, yellow-flowered mulleins to examine their woolly stems and the light-reflecting facets of the leaf: “Annually for three summers now, they and I have silently re-turn’d together.” He resumed that participatory sensuality in which “subject” and “object” dissolve to be replaced by a presence, an “invisible physician” he calls it now, whose medicine “neither chemistry nor reasoning nor esthetics will give the least explanation.” He wanted to be healed. “Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine?”he asks the sky. “And dost Thou subtly mystically now drip it through the air invisibly upon me?”